Engineering Manager and Evangelist

Posts in Category "Macromedia"

It’s still strange to say I work for Adobe now, but the integration is going well. For the most part, the change is gradual, but a few things have happened overnight:

We now have free sodas. With all the complexities of merging two big companies, someone actually took the time to make sure our sodas were free on day one. Nice touch!

Email. I spent most of the day yesterday getting Outlook reconfigured. My favorite email client is Apple’s Mail.app, but when I switched to Windows a few months ago, I decided to go all the way and give Outlook a try. Despite the fact that it’s woefully lacking in some areas, and not overly easy to work with, it’s pretty powerful when combined with Exchange. Anyway, my Macromedia email account (folders and messages) was migrated, but not my filters, so I spent a large portion of the day yesterday unsubscribing from email lists, resubscribing with my new Adobe email address, and creating new filters to keep my mail organized.

I was also informed yesterday by the Adobe IT department that my external Macromedia email address accounts for 77% of all virus related email inside of Macromedia, and 40% inside of Adobe. That’s quite a distinction to have bestowed upon me. I don’t have any viruses myself — those numbers refer specifically to virus related email being sent to me. The reason is most likely because my Macromedia address is very public. It’s posted everywhere, and apparently it is in a lot of infected Outlook address books. Anyway, the upshot is that my old external Macromedia email address, cantrell@macromedia.com, is getting shut down to reduce email traffic, and I’m switching to this one:

The old address will get shut down at some point today at which point this will be the best way to reach me.

Although you’ve probably already seen the Flex 2.0 product family announcement, you can now see a video clip of Kevin Lynch actually delivering the official announcement at Web 2.0. Mike Chambers got Kevin’s entire presentation on tape. It’s only about 15 minutes long, but Kevin packs in a ton of good information, including building a very nice little application using Flex Builder 2 (Zorn) in only about 5 minutes. The clip is available as Flash video both on Mike’s blog and on Google Video. If you get seasick, brace yourself for about the first 30 seconds, but after that, it stabilizes.

Outside of North America, seminars will be held in Australia, China, India, New Zealand, and in South Asia. These look like a really good way to quickly get up to speed on new Studio 8 features. And it’s cheaper than a movie, so bring a date!

By now, anyone who reads this blog probably knows that Macromedia announced Studio 8 today, so I won’t get into details about something you already know. Rather, I wanted to point out some good resources for learning about what’s new.

First, check out Greg Rewis’s new blog. Greg is the Macromedia Studio Evangelist, and he’ll be using his blog to post details about several important new features (like today’s post about code collapse in Dreamweaver). Scott Fegette has started a "Feature of the Day" campaign on his blog, and will post about a new Studio 8 feature each day until the actual launch. And finally, there’s the new MXNA Studio 8 Smart Category which will show you what the rest of the Macromedia community is saying about the announcement.

If you come across any other good resources, feel free to post them here.

A little over a year ago, the Macromedia Developer Relations team introduced the Macromedia Product RSS feeds to help our community keep up with product updates, security bulletins, tech notes, and Developer Center articles. We took them down for about a week as we began migrating community services from the old markme.com server to the new Macromedia weblogs server. I’ve been getting several emails a day from people wondering what happened to the feeds, so I decided my priority for the day was to get them fully migrated (it wasn’t just a matter of copying the files over — we also switched to a new system for generating and maintaining them). Anyway, I got it all done, so all the product feeds should be working again. Please let me know if you notice anything screwy.

How many people out there listen to podcasts? Do you iTunes, or something else? (I’m wavering back and forth between iTunes and Shrook right now.) And what podcasts do you listen to regularly? I’m flying to New York tomorrow for Flashforward, so I’d like to stock up on some podcasts for the flight.

If you’ve been following Macromedia weblogs for longer than the last few months, you know that we used our own domain (markme.com) before migrating to weblogs.macromedia.com. We haven’t fully completed the migration, though. We still have several weblogs to move over, as well as the Macromedia Product RSS Feeds. We need to bring markme.com down for a few hours today as part of some unexpected maintenance, so if you still count on resources on the markme.com domain, they will be unavailable for a little while today. We’ll let you know when the server is back up.

I finally got the Macromedia Developer Relations Podcast submitted to iTunes. The documentation Apple provides for the special iTunes meta-data tags has some inconsistencies, and I found at least one major bug in their submission process, so it took several hours for me to finally get it submitted. In case you’re having problems, as well, it seems you can’t add iTunes category tags at the channel level (even though the docs say you can). For some reason, if you use bogus or incorrect categories, the feed is accepted (but the categories ignored), but if you use real and current categories, you get back an error saying that the iTunes Store is experiencing technical difficulties, and to try again later. The work around seems to be to remove the category tags at the channel level altogether (they seem to work at the item level), and just pick a category and sub-category through the feed submission interface.

Anyway, the feed hasn’t shown up yet. After you submit your feed, it tells you that it may not show up right away, and it might need to be reviewed or something, so I’m not sure how long that will take. If anyone notices that it has been added, please drop me a comment. It’s in the category "Technology" under the subcategory "Developers".

In other news, I’m about to move yet again, so I’m going to be offline most likely until next week. This is the third time I’ve blogged about moving in about 2.5 years, which isn’t a good sign. I’m staying in San Francisco, but moving from a rental into a house that I bought, so hopefully I’ll actually plant some roots and stay in one place for a while.

Macromedia is hiring! If you are excited by innovative new web technologies, and
think you can inspire excitement in others, this could be an opportunity for you.
The two most important qualities for a position like this are technical knowledge
and speaking/meeting skills. Here’s a summary from the job posting:

As a Technical Evangelist for Macromedia Flex, the new presentation server for
building enterprise-class Rich Internet Applications, you will be responsible for
generating excitement around the technology. Your unique combination of deep technical
skills and outstanding communication skills will allow you to inspire a wide variety
of audiences, from business owners to hardcore architects and developers.

Requirements include a strong background in software engineering (server- and
client-side), thorough knowledge of J2EE and/or .NET, knowledge of design patterns,
outstanding speaking and writing skills, and one or two other key qualities.

Check out the job posting for more information, including how to apply.